Friends,

Memorial Day is a day to honor the men and women who bravely gave their lives in defense of American democracy. As we reflect on their sacrifice, we should be asking ourselves how we can honor them during a time when there is so much division in our country and when the foundations of our democracy are often under attack.

Today, less than one percent of Americans serve in the military. Most Americans don't have a connection to someone killed in action or to the military community more broadly. Memorial Day is a chance for all Americans to reflect on the generations of Americans who made the ultimate sacrifice. It's also a chance to reflect on why they made that sacrifice.

To us, it is the promise of America. The Founding Fathers set the task for us when they wrote in the Constitution that, "we the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union… do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America." In the two hundred and plus years since, we've endeavored to form a more perfect union in starts and stops. From the evils of slavery, Reconstruction, segregation, and Jim Crow to the Civil Rights movement and our ongoing fight for racial, climate, and economic justice, the story of American has been one of struggle to achieve our higher ideals.

So after a long-overdue and ongoing reckoning with racial violence, more than 500K American lives lost to a once-in-a-century pandemic, and a deadly insurrection on our Capitol, has the distance between the American dream and our American reality become a chasm simply too wide to cross?

In a word, no. In Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, he correctly noted that it is the livings' job to dedicate themselves to "the unfinished work'' that the dead fought to "nobly advance."

From city halls to the halls of Congress, women and men are seeking to represent their communities with a commitment to servant leadership — the kind of leadership that puts the interest of people over politics and service before self. And the well from which we draw both our strength and hope is found in our shared American story.

As we gather with friends and family this Memorial Day, I urge every American to think of the sacrifice on which this country was built. Let us always remember that we're united — not by class, creed, or ideology, but by our shared values, our shared history, and our love of a country that is not perfect but is striving to be. Let us find hope in the hard and inexorably unfinished work of building and revitalizing a democracy that may one day be worthy of every life given in its name.

Thank you,

Jason








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